I was savaged for saying my party sold its soul by letting gambling boom. I take no pride in having been proved right

Of course, I was accused of gross disloyalty. But I made no apology then and I make no apology now for what I, a lifelong Labour supporter, wrote in this newspaper four years ago.

The Blair government’s decision to promote gambling was shameful, I said — ‘shameful because it betrays what, long ago, were the best instincts of the Labour Party and exposes thousands of vulnerable people to exploitation and the misery of debt’.

Gordon Brown later cancelled the plans to build a super-casino — which Tony Blair saw as a remedy for unemployment and dereliction in Manchester. But then, just as it seemed that he and his ministers had come to their senses and accepted their moral responsibility to the nation — came the moral U-turn.

Wheel of debt: Relaxed gambling laws have led to debt, crime and vice

Permission was granted for 16 regional casinos to ply their dubious trade in every provincial city. Membership rules for casinos were relaxed to enable new punters to walk in the door and begin, at once, to throw their money away.

Betting machines — which have rightly earned the name of ‘one-armed bandits’ — were allowed to spread like a swarm of hungry locusts, devouring the pound coins of fruit machine addicts who always lose but tell themselves ‘next time I’ll win’.

And because the rules were relaxed to allow the opening of more betting shops, they sprang up in their scores on High Streets across the land.

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In the borough of Lewisham, South London, for example, scores of licences were granted after the Gambling Act came into force, while local pressure groups complain furiously that there are now at least eight betting shops on Deptford High Street alone.

Online gambling, too, has become far more popular, with endless stories of men and women going bankrupt because they cannot afford the losses that too often occur when they sit at computer screens for hours betting money they should never dare to risk.

Addictive: The ease of online gambling has cost families thousands

Perhaps worst of all, the relaxation of the regulations was accompanied by the agreement that gambling commercials would be allowed on television. For the first time, the casino operators and bookmakers were allowed to reach into every home in Britain. Though a watershed was established for these, it didn’t apply during sports events.

So it was that boys and girls would sit down on a Sunday afternoon to be greeted by the message, pumped out during commercial breaks in a football match: ‘It’s more exciting when you have money on it.’

In one advert, an actor made famous by his portrayal of thugs and crooks strode across our screens at half-time in big games explaining how easy it was to make an instant bet on the full-time result, the time of the next goal, or the name of the player who scored it.

‘Problem gamblers’ as they are called now, amount to 0.9 per cent of the
population — an increase from 0.6 per cent which takes the total to an
almost incredible 450,000 men and women.

Some people will say — though I do not agree with them — that in a free society citizens who want to gamble should be allowed to squander their hard-earned cash in whatever way they choose.

But it is impossible to argue — with any ethical justification — that the Government, in league with the industry, is entitled to encourage an increase in gambling. That is what the agreement to allow advertising on television amounts to.

Figures produced by the Gambling Commission earlier this week confirm that since the relaxation of the law, the number of addicts has increased dramatically.

‘Problem gamblers’ as they are called now, amount to 0.9 per cent of the population — an increase from 0.6 per cent which takes the total to an almost incredible 450,000 men and women.

And let us not deceive ourselves about who these problem gamblers are. They are not Gulf sheiks or Russian oligarchs squandering oil revenues in Mayfair nightclubs. Most of them are working men and women who are throwing away money that they and their families need to spend on real necessities.

In other words, the very people the Labour Party should seek to help. The Las Vegas casinos confirm that, very often, the most obsessive gamblers are the people who can least afford to gamble. Notices above the cashiers’ desks in America’s gaming capital announce:‘Welfare cheques cashed here.’

Yet the relaxation of the gambling laws in Britain, combined with the betting industry’s new right to advertise, entices the least well-off to waste what little they have.

On every high street: Bookmakers can be seen across the land since gambling laws were changed

To my mind, the Government of 2007 were only too well aware of what the consequences would be in terms of the number of people that would be sucked into gambling: the looser the regulations governing casinos, online gambling and fruit machines, the higher the number who would use them.

When Blackpool was pitching for a casino, the promoters of the idea cheerfully announced that its success depended on attracting half-a-million punters each year.

Nobody could pretend that they would all be established gamblers who simply switched from one gaming table to another. When the Gambling Commission visited my home town of Sheffield to investigate the possibility of a super casino being built there, they were told that the prospective owner’s aim (and the only way to make a profit) was to entice between 3,000 and 5,000 converts to gambling and make them regular customers.

When the relaxation of gambling laws was announced, Tessa Jowell, the then Secretary for Culture, Media and Sport, assured the public that the industry would react to its new freedom in a ‘responsible’ way. I did not believe it at the time and this week’s figures prove that prediction to be naive nonsense.

We must consider the social damage that gambling causes and the cost to
the nation in lives ruined, families destroyed and hopes shattered.

Is it responsible to behave in a way that results in addiction growing by 50 per cent? Responsible to cause the number of distressed callers on an addicts’ ‘hot line’ to increase to 38,000?

Or responsible to encourage the average debt of the hardened addict to rise from £13,800 to £17,500 in a year with some of them owing £100,000 or more?

Did anyone believe that the men who run our betting shops, casinos and internet gambling sites would cross-examine every customer before a bet was placed or that it was reasonable to expect them to do so?

The responsibility lies squarely on the shoulders of the Labour ministers who caused a social crisis that only the ministers now left to clear up the mess can remedy.

It should not be hard for the current incumbents to do so. Of course, the gambling industry itself will say it is a £100 million enterprise that ought to be encouraged because of its contribution to the economy. But should Britain — once the workshop of the world — really have to rely on betting taxes to keep its revenue in balance?

We must consider the social damage that gambling causes and the cost to the nation in lives ruined, families destroyed and hopes shattered.

Financial woe: Gambling addicts have faced rising debts

This week’s survey confirms fears that the curse of gambling encourages other crimes and vice.

At one end of the scale, there is violence and extortion. At the other heavy drinking — especially among young gamblers. The more the facts are laid out, the more incredible it becomes that the gambling laws, instead of being tightened, were relaxed.

Last Tuesday, John Penrose, the tourism minister, attacked the decision to relax the gambling regulations. I do not blame him for that. He then went on to make one of those half promises that politicians love. The Coalition is ‘looking into the problem urgently’ and will ‘shortly announce measures to tackle it’.

Let us keep him to his word and let the Labour Opposition not only support, but initiate, a tougher gambling regime.

The relaxation is one of the parts of New Labour’s past that today’s Shadow Cabinet needs to repudiate. It would be a recognition that Labour is now a party of principle again — a party which protects the vulnerable and, ignoring the special pleading of vested interests, speaks for Britain’s responsible and respectable majority.